Struggles on Cata, Playing solo+bots, recent changes

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 General Discussion
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TL;DR
I think that some of the changes they’ve made recently with Bots and THP generation are making solo+Bots unnecessarily difficult.

As of the start of the skulls event I decided that I finally wanted to complete the maps I had yet to complete on cata. For reference I have ~2300 hours on V2, I play mainly solo+bots on Legend difficulty and can complete all the maps on legend with books with little trouble, probably about a 90% or higher success rate varying with the map and char/class.

I had already completed 16 of the 31 maps on cata prior to the skulls event which left me with 15 left to complete. I breezed through the first 10 of them with little difficulty, 1-2 attempts on average, however the last 5 have been a real challenge. 2 of the maps, Halescourge and War Camp, I did eventually complete after many failed attempts, usually the result of an inconvenient monster spawn, ridiculous special spawns or the bots exhibiting stupid behaviours. The final 3 have been extremely hard and I have yet to complete as of me writing this; Old Haunts, The Enchanters Lair and The Skittergate.

Old Haunts and The Enchanters Lair I think are definitely possible, and I’ve had a few attempts come close to completion, however the many attempts I have had have resulted in failure due to the bots exhibiting one of the following behaviours:

  • Wandering far from the player
  • Standing in the way of Rattling Gunner and Warpfire Thrower attacks
  • Refusing to shoot specials incapacitating the player or other bots
  • Getting stuck or standing in place in certain spots, usually dropdowns
  • Refusing to revive the player or other bots
  • Taking damage when fighting regular enemies 1v1

Skittergate on the other hand I believe is impossible with bots, without using cheesy strategies, as they just can’t deal with the Deathrattlers gunfire in the final arena and if Deathrattler doesn’t kill them the elites that spawn during the fight will.

I also believe the changes in THP regeneration have also effected the bots performance as since the stagger THP has been somewhat decreased their ability to survive generating way less THP.

Maybe its just a case of just play with randoms or “git gud” but the ability to play solo is one of the things that keep me invested in V2, the fact that I don’t need other people to play with to be able to enjoy this awesome game. I also dislike the fact that there is a decent amount of content locked behind versus mode, which imo is just unplayable as a solo player as matchmaking is a nightmare and is just a generally unfun experience and with no other way to earn the versus coins I’ve practically given up on earning the achievements and cosmetics in the versus shop. I wish that they had given us the option, like they did for consoles, to buy the cosmetics with regular shillings. Hell even if they made the versus coins earnable like weave essence is in regular games, even if it was 1 coin at a time.

In conclusion I hope issues with the bots are addressed soon, generally I don’t have any problem with them below the cata difficulty, but bots should be able to hold up in any official difficulty. They don’t need to be instant kill perfect bots but at the very least they should be made to act and behave more like competent human players. Vermintide 2 is easily my favourite game and I want to see it improved as much as possible before support for it finally runs its course, and I want my favourite game to continue to be accessible to players like myself who enjoy a single player experience as these experiences are becoming too few and far between these days.

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Old Haunts and The Enchanter’s Lair are almost impossible with bots because of the end events. The Skittergate is doable but still pretty hard. Better to find living people for it.

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Old Haunts isnt so bad, no? Sure its a right gauntlet at the end but no monster or disabler spawns in droves, its simply bursts of elites with a few specials. Feels like it absolutely should be doable…but difficult.

Enchanters lair and skittergate tho, yeah no i do not believe the bots can cope with flies in the former so any chaos warrior wave + flies would just be an instant wipe. And even if getting past that, knockback into knockup would devestate any bot without a shield but a shield bot would struggle to cope with Nurgloth and his adds.

Maaaaaaybe Shade with 4x conc pots? Or Huntsman but harder that.

As for skittergate…feels like deathrattler should be doable too somehow but doesnt the game start spawning a lot more adds if you dont force rasknit to teleport around very rapidly? It may be doable but it´d be rough.

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For me OH is definitely harder with bots than SG. In SG you need to just kill Rasknitt and it is over and also you fight in the well-arranged arena where you can watch you bots clearly. In OH the amount of spawned enemies is insane (especially CWs and Monks), you need to carry those heads and also protect your bots which is incredibly hard because you often cannot see them while they do something incredibly stupid just around the corner and it does not even end with the end event - I died many times after it even with other players.

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git gud :rat: :crossed_swords: :wink:

I would say if you struggle to solo cata, you probably need to check what’s the situation you die the most and work on it.

Also consider playing good all rounder careers to avoid weaknesses as your bots wont do what you need them to do most of the time :wink:
Usually something that can handle monsters decently and has good mobility is the best way to start off.

hf

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You’re completely ignoring the genuine complaints with “git gud”. Yes, the bots can be played around in most situations, but the recent change to the bot’s revive AI has made it so that if there’s more than one clan rat in a 10-kilometer radius the bot will just hold block and stand on the downed player/bot until they time out. Before, they’d die trying to pick the downed player/bot up, and I’d prefer them to die trying than watch them not do anything at all

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I disagree, from my experience bots are significantly better at reviving, I’ve had many situations where bots went for a revive when in the past I know they wouldn’t have. Two big changes I’ve noticed are:
Bots start reviving when they get in range rather than having to stand on top of the downed player.
Bots actually attempt revives even when monsters are around - in the past, I remember that unless you were downed right on top of a bot it’d never even attempt to revive, instead hyperfixating on a monster until it’s dead.
Here’s just one clip of a revive in a very tense situation - WP goes for a ledged Bardin, as that happens I get hooked and the moment IB is free he ults, freeing up WP from an assassin, who proceeds to revive me at max distance immediately, despite surrounding stormvermin and horde.
I think I could find more clips of bots reviving me/bots in tough situations.

What did get somewhat worse is behaviour around specials and pathfinding:
Wild goose chases for Globadiers were a thing before the patch, as well as running into ratling and warpfire headfirst (despite having a shield/handgun). But now I see bots stand in place with their ranged out, completely motionless - I think it happens around Ratlings - this is a new behaviour (I might try to find a clip of that).

Also, bots seem to get more stuck on the enviromnent and what’s most new is that they are very apprehensive about jumping down to the next area, just standing right at the ledge, sometimes it feels connected to the Ratling/specials thing.

It also feels like bots got a bit better around monsters - they still hyperfixate on them, but seemingly block attacks from the surrounding enemies too - I think I could find a clip of bots fighting a troll while surrounded by horde for about 20 seconds and they barely took any damage - in the past I remember them getting obliterated in such case.

Although they continue to be absolutely useless against Minotaurs and I have even been considering making a bug report on it. While they are fine with Mino’s standing singular attack, they completely melt against its walking-combo-attacks - that’s because they don’t block it, they just attack into it and end up getting mulched. It also feels like they do worse 1vs1 a Mino than fighting a Mino + horde because they seem to block more due to the horde attacks, but I’ll be testing it more.
The most ridiculous recording I have is of IB easily surviving ~20 CW Twitch spawn-in + some horde and specials that took about 3-4 minutes to kill, only to die to a single mino (just a monster, nothing else around) in ~30 seconds while at 80% hp…

Tbh, they seem to do the worst with Deathrattler’s slam attack - the AOE one that knocks everyone back, because they seem to not block it at all. As for completing it on Cataclysm - you want either one of two things:
– Super fast monster killing e.g. Shade with Dual Daggers - this is the easiest and fastest way.
– Ability to respawn bots despite Deathrattler’s shooting e.g. shield/invisibility - as long as you can keep yourself alive, you can just keep respawning bots after they die and slowly whittle both rats down. Also, some ranged attack to interrupt Rasknitt’s spell casting.

As for Enchanter’s Lair, it’s pretty much the same, either keep yourself alive and respawn bots, or burst the boss down. Here it’s important to save your burst tools for the phase where Nurgloth is flying around with his Scythe because that’s when he’s most dangerous.

Otherwise, it’s sort of all about not dying yourself (easier said than done).

To me, it feels like bots have gotten better at generating THP. An unprovable anecdote I have is that on my first game on the new patch, I thought they only added the new map and no balance changes, and whilst playing it I remember thinking to myself how bots thp seems to be abnormally high and wondering if they updated them, only to find the whole slew of changes. So, my feelings have been that FK with Spear and Shield, WP with Flail and Shield and IB with Axe and Shield all have been doing better on generating thp on cataclysm, but that’s just a feeling. Maybe it’s thp from kills or pushes? Or better bot behaviour? Not sure.

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You’re extremely lucky then, because I’ve lost 3 or 4 runs to Bardin standing on me, holding block (might push once or twice) until I time out with a single Storm Vermin attacking him after he did the same to the other two bots while I was downed. Didn’t try to kill it, just blocked and pushed it.

It’s not always Bardin, but it’s always the same situation of one or two enemies and the bot holding block while standing on the body.

One time it was both Kruber and Bardin standing on me as Kerillian’s downed body distracted the chaos warrior and rotshield. It was just regular chaos enemies and they wouldn’t do anything but ult on CD and hold block

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I appreciate all the feedback guys :). Tbh when I made the original post I may have been a little discouraged after several losses and no real progress after having smashed out so many in quick succession. Despite what I said in the original post, I definitely think that they’re all possible if not extremely difficult. I will continue to attempt to complete them going forward, however due to my son only being born a few days ago, another motivator trying to knock em out before he arrived, I don’t think I’ll be putting nearly as much time into V2 as I had been previously. Again thanks for the feedback guys, here’s hoping I can git gud and get em done sometime in the future :slight_smile:

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